An Armchair Traveller's History of Tokyo by Jonathan Clements

Author:Jonathan Clements
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781909961593
Publisher: Haus Publishing
Published: 2018-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Appeasing the Nation

The dealers of the Akihabara arcades flourished as spivs and black marketeers, somehow always able to find some lard fallen from the back of a freight truck, or some mushrooms sourced from a secret mountain cache. American food aid arrived by the shipload, although there was a catch: the Japanese were ultimately expected to reimburse their new rulers for this ‘charity’, even though a cynic might observe that it amounted to offloading tonnes of surplus American grain on the local market. The Japanese were not all that sure what to do with wheat, and chafed at advertisements that exhorted them to bake bread and biscuits. A more acceptable local alternative came when entrepreneurial hawkers turned the wheat into noodles, boiled in a broth with a variety of odds and ends. None of these ingredients were particularly new – ‘Chinese’ soup noodles had been sold in Japan for decades – but these post-war ramen, often sold on the streets by returnees from Japan’s former possessions in China, soon became a regular sight. A scrap of black-market meat or fat and a scattering of whatever vegetables were to hand, in a piping hot soup, became the default lunch of Japan’s working man (see Eating and Drinking).

As food shortages eased, Akihabara adopted a sideline in modern goods. What better place, after all, with the freight trains coming through, to sell electric fans, iceboxes and (by the late 1950s) transistor radio parts? Just as in its vegetable days, Akihabara became notorious for its fierce competition, as neighbouring dealers fought to undercut each other, sometimes by selling goods that had been obtained through underhand means.

The Occupation era imposed a censorship policy almost as harsh as that of the militarist regime it had supplanted. It launched a ruthless war against references to Japan’s past, particularly the samurai elite that it accused of luring the people of Japan into the ‘dark valley’ of militarism. That was all very well, but the samurai had dominated Japan for a thousand years; Japan’s cultural make-up – its artefacts, its historical personages, even its fashions – had been fundamentally steered by the wants and wishes of the military men who had run the nation since the Middle Ages.

Some elements of Japanese culture were only preserved through careful management of expectations and loopholes. Kabuki theatre, which once featured an entire subgenre of modern-dress potboiler plays, improvised overnight and ripped from the newspaper headlines of the day, suddenly concentrated only on the classical repertoire. Martial arts, formerly integrated heavily into the militarised culture of the Empire, were abruptly reinvented as sports or religions that played down the practicalities of knowing how to punch people. The samurai and their modern military successors had dominated Japanese culture for so long that it sometimes seemed impossible to extricate them from it. In a bold move in 1948, an antiquarian society mounted an exhibition of Japanese swords, pleading with visitors to appreciate them not as weapons, but as works of intricate art and exquisite craft.

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